The affective strategies of White unknowing: how police violence reveals the expression of racialized emotions on Twitter

Abstract

Racism shapes the ways racialized actors and groups feel about the social world, but how does racism get reproduced through affective politics, the unequal ways White and Black Americans express feeling—or unfeeling—and consequently act—or don’t act—in response to racist violence? We use Twitter data and a combination of computational sentiment and qualitative content analyses to document and interrogate the racialized expression of emotions in response to two high-profile cases of racist police violence—the murders of Michael Brown and Tamir Rice. Using computational analyses, we first examine the racialized distributions of emotions before and after these murders. Results from these analyses showed especially high levels of negative emotion among Black women and men following these events and striking increases in negative emotion for both Black and White users in the wake of the murders. We then use content analyses to hand-code a random sample of White users’ Tweets to critically interrogate their affective expressions in response to racist police violence. Content analysis of White users’ Tweets revealed patterns of both White feeling and “un”-feeling. White feelings expressed through anger, fear, hope, and sadness emerge largely to protect rather than interrogate White dominance and complicity in White supremacy. White users evoked modes of apathy like humor and logic in service of minimizing, delegitimizing, and altogether evading racial reality. Our study highlights the utility of mixed-methods approaches to the study of racialized emotions, with findings holding implications for studies of inequality, politics, and emotions.